Ukraine

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to join others in warmly congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, on his exemplary maiden speech. I have three short questions to ask the Minister before I make some remarks about North Korea. First, can she tell us what progress has been made in releasing funds to Ukraine from the £2.5 billion sale of Chelsea Football Club and the £783,000 recovered in the Petr Aven case? Secondly—this is the issue I raised with her on Monday—what prosecutions will be mounted against United Kingdom insurers that cover the 12 sanction-busting liquefied natural gas tankers currently benefiting from UK protection and indemnity insurance? Thirdly, will we look at amending the legal limitations in Sections 51 and 58 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001 that prevent the UK prosecuting core international crimes and at the role that universal jurisdiction might play in ensuring justice?

During Question Time on Wednesday, I referred to Monday’s meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, which I co-chair with Sir Iain Duncan Smith. At that meeting we discussed how 10 years ago a United Nations commission of inquiry described North Korea as a country without parallel that was guilty of crimes against humanity. It called for the Security Council to refer the leadership to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. We have never tabled a resolution to do that. The Minister kindly promised to reflect on that issue.

The same North Korean regime has violated Security Council resolutions, developed weapons of mass destruction and circumvented sanctions. Emboldened by this failure to hold it to account, it has shipped at least 16,500 containers of munitions, perhaps as many as 4.8 million artillery shells and scores of ballistic missiles to sustain Putin’s war in Ukraine. Robert Koepcke, a US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, believes Russia has launched more than 65 missiles of North Korean origin at targets in Ukraine. With Iran and China widening and escalating the existential war in Ukraine, this threatens free societies the world over, as other noble Lords have said.

I visited North Korea. I saw grinding poverty, food shortages and stunted growth caused by malnutrition. Its dangerously provocative missile tests cost about $1 billion a year, around 4% of North Korea’s economy, and at least 16% of government expenditure is on its war machine—money that could be used to feed its people 10 times over. It constantly threatens its neighbours, with dictator Kim calling for an exponential increase of nuclear warheads, mass production of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons and the development of more advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the US mainland. Now, as part of what the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, has described as a “deadly quartet”, an axis of dictators, anything between 2,000 and 13,000 North Korean soldiers are being trained in eastern Russia for combat in Putin’s war.

This is part of a global struggle; it is ultimately about dictatorship versus democracy. We have been here before. During the Cold War we saw security and our democratic values, openly expressed and promoted in the Helsinki process, as two sides of one coin. That was exemplified by the leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with singular others, such as Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II, understanding the enormity of the challenge and the opportunity it also presented.

The same earnest desire for freedom that brought down the Berlin Wall 35 years ago next month is there in North Korea. Ask the more than 30,000 escapees, some of whom experienced the Gulags in which 100,000 people are still held and which are characterised by torture, brutality and degradation; or the young soldier who in August risked his life to walk through a minefield to gain the freedom of democratic South Korea; or the family who last year managed to get out of North Korea in a small boat, one of whom described how he had been forced to watch the execution of a 22 year-old caught listening to South Korean music and viewing banned movies; or the North Korean teenagers sentenced to hard labour for being caught looking at K-drama.

Be clear: this is one of the most repressive and controlling states on earth, so we must reach over the heads of Putin and Kim before more young men are sent to their deaths, this time on the front line in Ukraine. By physical or cyber messaging, they must be told that they can walk to freedom across the front line in Ukraine with a route to a new life in Seoul, with citizenship guaranteed under South Korea’s constitution. This is not a flight of fancy. In 2016 Thae Yong-ho, deputy North Korean ambassador in London, walked out of the embassy with his family and never returned. In due course he was elected to the South Korean National Assembly. He told me that his observation of our way of life had convinced him of the case for democracy rather than dictatorship.

In addition to boldly offering an alternative to totalitarianism, why are we not using our place at the Security Council to assert our belief in the rule of law and demanding that the UN’s own findings of crimes against humanity reach the ICC or the ICJ? If that is vetoed, we should create our own special court as we did in 1945. The responsibility for crimes against humanity, WMD, violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions and now soldiers being sent to fight in Europe resides with the Workers’ Party of Korea and the singular authority of its supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, and they must be held to account and brought to justice.